New in version 12

October 28th, 2014

New products based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 feature enhancements that more readily enable system uptime, improve operational efficiency and accelerate innovation. The foundation for all SUSE data center operating systems and extensions, SUSE Linux Enterprise meets the performance requirements of data centers with mixed IT environments, while reducing the risk of technological obsolescence and vendor lock-in.

With this release, SUSE also introduces an updated customer portal, SUSE Customer Center, to make it easier for customers to manage their subscriptions, access patches and updates, and communicate with SUSE customer support.

New operating systems and software extensions based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 include:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for x86_64, IBM Power Systems and IBM System z—versatile server operating systems for delivering business-critical IT services in a variety of physical, virtual and cloud environments. New features like full system rollback, live kernel patching enablement and software modules increase data center uptime, improve operational efficiency and accelerate the adoption of open source innovation. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 further builds on SUSE's leadership with Linux Containers technology and adds the Docker framework, which is now included as an integral part of the operating system.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server takes advantage of IBM POWER8 processor-based hardware optimizations that include support for little-endian Linux applications running on simultaneous multithreaded (SMT8) and PowerKVM environments. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z improves workload performance through instruction set exploitation for the last two generations of IBM System z processors, state-of-the art support for cryptographic accelerators and the related software stack, and enhancements for operational tasks like faster DASD formatting with dasdfmt or multiple point-to-point NETIUCV interfaces between Linux on System z and z/VM instances.

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension and Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension—clustering software for increasing services availability, physical and virtual, local and global. A new web console, updated OCFS2 and GFS2 file system support, and the latest updates in ReaR for disaster recovery make protecting core business systems quick and easy.

New in version 11 SP3 (July 9th, 2013)

This latest service pack brings additional industry-standard hardware support and open source features and enhancements to SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing - across physical, virtual and cloud environments. With Service Pack 3, customers can achieve better workload performance in a more scalable, secure and cost-effective manner.

"IT plays a critical role in our business strategy, and SUSE Linux Enterprise has been our platform of choice for running mission-critical workloads for many years," said Urs Frey from Informationstechnologie at Die Schweizerische Post. "The stability and usability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 3 is quite impressive, and we plan to deploy more workloads on it.”

Service Pack 3 gives customers more scale-up and scale-out options to run their mission-critical workloads with support for new hardware, features and enhancements. Service Pack 3 also includes all of the patches and updates released since the introduction of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 in 2009. As a result, it is the most secure foundation available for migrating workloads from UNIX and other operating systems and running them reliably and cost effectively.

Service Pack 3 is the ideal scale-up choice to migrate resource-intensive workloads that run on RISC/UNIX systems. It exhibits excellent scaling behavior and virtualized workload support for the latest AMD Opteron™ 4000 and 6000 Series Platforms. Service Pack 3 adds support for the latest Intel processors (Intel® Xeon® processor E5 Family and the 4th generation Intel® Core™ processor), and it has features specifically related to these processors for improvements in virtualization and power savings. These Intel processors have improved performance, reduced network I/O latency and increased energy efficiency compared to earlier generations.

Service Pack 3 can scale up to support even the largest systems. Service Pack 3 supports up to 4,096 logical CPUs and 16TiB of system memory. Support for IBM zEnterprise System zEC12 Flash Express hardware allows access to low latency, high throughput storage and a reduction in SAN traffic. The large vertical scalability of SUSE Linux Enterprise makes it an ideal virtualization host for consolidating server workloads to increase server utilization and datacenter efficiency. Service Pack 3 includes commercial support for the latest open source hypervisors, KVM 1.4 and XEN 4.2. At the same time, Service Pack 3 supports hardware features delivered by the latest processors, to improve the efficiency of virtualized workloads. With high-performance x86 hardware, Service Pack 3 can provide a highly virtualized environment to run mission-critical workloads securely and cost effectively.

Service Pack 3 also offers improved scale-out for workloads with shared storage, such as web servers and clustered file servers. It includes important driver updates, such as Open Fabric Enterprise Distribution (OFED), that give customers faster connection speeds, greater choice of standards and easier fabric management. It also introduces features like LVM thin-provisioning and new iSCSI Target (LIO) for better storage virtualization and management.

To address IT service availability challenges, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 11 Service Pack 3 packages the latest and best open source clustering technologies available in the market today. Available on x86 (32 bit and 64 bit), Itanium, POWER and System z architectures, it delivers enhanced GUI usability and allows monitoring and managing services without installing software on the service side by using unique, new Blackbox monitoring. Furthermore, Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, the only available geo-clustering solution provided by an enterprise Linux vendor, offers unlimited distance high availability clustering. Both of these products support physical, hybrid and virtual clustering, giving customers greater flexibility in deployment.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was recently awarded Common Criteria Certification EAL 4+. In addition, in April 2013, SUSE Linux Enterprise received U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validation for its OpenSSL module. As a result, customers can rely on it for handling sensitive information and meeting defined standards. Service Pack 3 is the first enterprise Linux distribution to integrate the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) secure boot mechanism, significantly reducing the potential for malicious attacks during system start up.

New in version 11 SP2 (February 29th, 2012)

3.0 Linux kernel: SP2 includes scheduler and memory management optimizations, support for transparent huge pages and per-CPU network load balancing. These features improve the performance of compute and I/O intensive workloads. SP2 supports the latest Intel* Xeon and AMD* Opteron processors, and exploits new hardware RAS features like CPU and memory offlining.

Btrfs: SP2 is the first Linux platform to offer commercial btrfs filesystem support. Snapper, a unique tool that's integrated with YaST and Zypper, uses the copy-on-write and snapshot capabilities of btrfs to help administrators audit and roll-back system configuration changes, improving resiliency and services availability.

Linux Containers: SP2 includes support for Linux Containers - highly efficient and low overhead OS virtualization. Also designed to work well with Xen*, KVM, ESX and Hyper-V*, SP2 offers the most extensive virtualization capabilities of any enterprise Linux distribution.

New in version 11 (March 24th, 2009)

Novell today announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, the operating system designed for the next-generation data center. As data centers become more heterogeneous, customers are demanding a cost-effective platform that can run their applications reliably and with high performance on any hardware platform and hypervisor as well as in appliances and cloud computing infrastructures. With SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, Novell is delivering the leading mission-critical Linux* platform to allow customers to economically deploy workloads wherever and however they choose, with complete support from Novell and its global partner ecosystem of solution and hardware providers and independent software vendors (ISVs).

SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 delivers innovations across the enterprise. The platform contains major enhancements to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and delivers two new extensions – SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension, the only product that enables customers to run fully supported Microsoft* .NET-based applications on Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, a clustering product that ensures uptime for mission-critical applications while slashing the cost of ownership for high availability. As the operating system for the next-generation IT infrastructure, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 was designed using three core themes: ubiquity, interoperability and mission-critical computing.